A Woman's Place - Part 1

Sam is such a silly girl. She thinks that a woman can do anything a man can do, and she doesn’t like it when her boyfriend treats her like a stupid child. It’s a good thing he has a special video to show her, something that will help her learn her rightful place.

***

“What’s in the bags?” Sam asked her boyfriend as they walked home together. She’d been out with her girlfriends for brunch (that new vegan place in town), and James had been out doing some shopping.

“It’s a secret,” he told her, smiling mysteriously and winking. “You’ll find out soon.”

A present? Sam eyed the bags. They looked quite full. Maybe this was James' way of trying to make up for the arguments they’d been having recently. Sam didn’t consider herself a superficial girl by any means, but if her boyfriend had bought her some cute new clothes, then it could hardly hurt.

As always, it was her career they’d argued about. Sam was spending most of her time at work lately. It was exhausting, but it wasn’t as if she didn’t enjoy it. She liked how it felt to earn money for herself, to be financially independent – not like some stupid brat clinging onto a man’s arm. Women like that were no more than children, she thought, just little girls who never stopped being dependent on their “Daddies”, whether it was their fathers of their husbands.

But James kept insisting it was bad for her health to work so many hours, and once he’d even suggested that she’d be much happier if she spent her days at home instead, if she just let him “take care of her”.

She’d exploded at him over that one. She loved her boyfriend, but she wasn’t some silly, frilly housewife who’d greet him at the door with a curtsey and the promise of a home-cooked meal. She wasn’t a little girl who needed looking after. She was a strong, independent, capable career woman, and James would just have to accept that if he wanted to be with her.

The two of them were almost home when they bumped into James’ friend Daniel. There was something about Daniel’s expression that annoyed her – the way his eyes sparkled as they flicked from her to James, like he was laughing at some private joke.

“Hey,” said James easily. “How are things with you and Liz?”

There was something about James’s tone that Sam didn’t like either. It was that same supressed amusement.

“Really good,” Daniel grinned. Again, those sparkling eyes flitted from James to her and back again. “She’s been in a much better mood lately.”

Sam had to supress a smirk. She’d never liked Daniel, and she knew for a fact that Liz was planning to break up with him soon. That would wipe the amusement off his face. Liz was her best friend, just like Daniel was James’s, but what she’d ever seen in Daniel, Sam had never understood.

James laughed. “That’s good to hear. And do you have…?”

“Got it here,” Daniel replied, and he passed James something that looked like a DVD case.

“Thanks,” said James. “I’d better get going then. I’ve just been shopping, and I’m eager to get it all home.”

“I bet,” said Daniel, the corners of his mouth twitching. “I’ll see both of you around. James, Sammy.” He nodded at each of them, and walked away with that smirk still playing around his lips.

Sam scowled. She hated being called Sammy. Sammy was a little girl’s name.

Her eyes turned to the DVD case James was slipping into one of his shopping bags. A porno? If it was, she was going to be furious. But before she could start asking questions, James had hurried her over to their front door, whispering, “Come on, sweetheart. I think you’re going to love what I got for you.”

Slightly suspicious, Sam allowed herself to be led into the house. If that bag had some ridiculous fetishy costume in it for her to wear, then she’d be giving her boyfriend a piece of her mind. Some sexy lingerie would be okay, but if he wanted her to prance about in a schoolgirl outfit or something…

But James wasn’t even opening the bags. Instead, he’d taken out the DVD case and was in the process of inserting it into the player.

“Take a seat on the sofa, baby,” he said, and Sam bristled a little at the slightly patronising way he’d drawn out the last word. Baby.

But she’d made up her mind to humour him. After all, if he actually had got her some thoughtful present, if he really was trying to apologise for arguing with her about her ambitions, then she didn’t want to spoil it by getting angry over something like this. She’d just have a word with him later, she thought, as she took a seat on the sofa. I’m not a baby, James. Women aren’t children. I’d appreciate it if you could be a little less infantilising from now on, okay?

Then James stepped back from the TV, and a title came onto the screen. A Woman’s Place.

“A woman’s… What the hell is this?” Sam demanded. “What’s… what’s…” But she trailed off, her mouth hanging slightly open as she stared at the screen.

“That’s a good girl,” her boyfriend said gently, as a tinkling music filled the room, and the screen shone with a strange, swirling light. “Watch your pretty program.”

Then short clips began to flash in front of her, one after the other. A woman in a stylish dress, laughing and drinking from a glass of Champagne. Then that same woman again, but this time her dress had been swapped for a skimpy maid’s uniform, and she was bending over doing the polishing without any panties, flashing her bare pussy at the camera. Sam's eyes went wide.

Then another women was on the screen, arguing with her husband. But in the next clip, she was over her husband’s knee with her bright red bottom facing up, crying and wailing and kicking her legs while he spanked her forcefully.

Next, an elegantly dressed woman posing for a model shoot. But moments later, she was dressed in a pair of slutty shorts and a tank top. Her face was done up like a whore and, grinning dimly, she was holding up her brand-new pair of silicon-filled tits for the camera to see.

On and on it went. Sam tried to tear her eyes away, to speak, to do anything, but it was as though her body was frozen in place. What was going on?! All she could do was sit there blankly on the sofa, staring at the screen in front of her. A lawyer became a stripper dancing around a pole. A professor became a hooker standing on a street corner. Sam noticed that many of the women seemed to be high-status. There was a handsome, middle-aged woman in a pantsuit who might have been a CEO, shouting at a group of men seated before her. But then she was tottering around the office in heels, dressed in a ridiculous schoolgirl uniform, giggling vapidly while the men wolf-whistled and pinched her bottom as she passed.

Sam felt sick. Taking a successful woman and reducing her to something like that repulsed her, but even worse than the ones where women were reduced to sex objects were the ones where they were infantilised in some way as well – and as she watched, her eyes glued to the screen, those clips only became more and more frequent.

A serious-faced woman in casual-wear became an overgrown little girl in a frilly pink frock, complete with braces and a pair of high pigtails. She was clutching a teddy-bear tightly, and her expression was full of dim-witted happiness. A businesswoman in a well-tailored suit was striding about an office, examining paperwork. But then she was toddling around an oversized nursery instead, and she was naked but for a frilly bonnet, a small bib that did nothing to hide her sizeable breasts, and a thick adult diaper sagging between her legs. A woman playing on the playground, a woman crying like a two-year-old because she’d dropped her ice cream, a woman sitting in a highchair with her face covered in baby food, a woman squatting down on a toddler’s potty, a woman lying on her back in the middle of a nappy change – all in between occasional returns to women dressed as maids or whores or ditzy little housewives. Then Sam felt a sense of terrible horror as the video ended, quite suddenly, on a still picture of her own smiling face.

A wave of dizziness rushed over her. The tinkling music grew louder and louder, and the pretty lights sparkled and shone more brightly as Sam stared into her own face on the screen. It felt as though the music was filling her head, the lights shining through her eyes and into her skull. Her vision blurred, and she felt a sensation of falling, as though she’d been pitched forwards head first into the screen, deeper and deeper into the swirling colours.